Click here for PDF of press release.

The Northern Kentucky TEA Party is encouraged today with the filing of a lawsuit asking the Kentucky Court of Justice to enjoin the Kenton County Clerk from depriving the citizens of Kenton County of their legal right to vote by referendum on whether there is any continued need for the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission.

Nearly 25,000 people petitioned to have this issue placed on the November ballot but the County Clerk has disqualified enough of those petitioners to prevent the issue from appearing.

Throughout the petition gathering process and before submitting the petitions to the Clerk, great care was taken to insure that the requisite number of qualified signatures had been secured. The Northern Kentucky TEA Party believes that swift action was required in order to insure that the voice of the voters would be heard this November.

“The TEA party members who have reviewed the disqualified petitions are confident that more than enough valid signatures were delivered to the Clerk to secure a place on the ballot for this issue this fall.” said Marcus Carey, attorney for the Northern Kentucky TEA party. “The Northern Kentucky TEA party stands in full support of the lawsuit and the statements made therein that had proper procedures been employed by the Clerk, that the voters of Kenton County would not be facing the risk of disenfranchisement which her decision now threatens”.

Representatives of the Northern Kentucky TEA party asked to meet with the clerk and her attorney in order to present to her the numerous errors discovered in her calculations after the TEA party was given the opportunity to review the lists of excluded petitioners. Errors were found in both methodology and calculations.

For example, the Clerk is supposed to use voter registration cards during the verification process. By the Clerk’s own admission this was not done.

In addition it has been discovered this week that the system used by the Clerk to identify registered voters was created in 1979. The limitations of this antiquated system crippled the Clerk’s ability to verify the registration status of many voters because the data was not searchable by any method other than by way of a correctly spelled name.

Today’s software contains new methods and technologies which didn’t exist 32 years ago. The clerk did not search for and identify individuals as registered voters by confirming the signatures they used according to their address if, for example, they signed the petition with a nick name rather than the full legal name under which they registered to vote.

As a result of these errors in methodology over 4,200 signatures were rejected. TEA party members have confirmed that many of the rejected signatures belong to individuals known to be registered voters.

The clerk disqualified over 1,500 petition signatures merely because, she said, the signatures were too difficult to read. The TEA party believes that County Clerks lack the authority to impose the additional requirement of good penmanship on top of what the law requires in order to acknowledge a valid voter signature.

And according to at least one Attorney General Opinion the Clerk should have used all of the information which could be found on the petition with an eye toward validating the signatures, rather than excluding them.

The TEA party understands that clerk Summe is new to this process. However, we believe that many of these problems could have been avoided had she merely followed the law more carefully, used voter registration cards instead of the computer data she chose and if she had employed more modern software configurations in conducting her research.

Members of the TEA party, after reviewing only the first 25 pages of rejected signatures, discovered that the Clerk’s error rate was 80?90%. In addition they immediately noticed that the Clerk had excluded the signatures of well know citizens and elected officials claiming that by using her methodology their registration status could not be verified.

Filing a lawsuit is serious business; however the right of voters’ to seek redress by petition is at risk of being denied.

The Northern Kentucky TEA party will continue to take all necessary steps and vigorously support every action taken to fully protect the voting rights of the citizens of Kenton County.